How Blockbuster was superior to Netflix


A giant red letter N. The Netflix logo.

It's a Friday night in the late 1990s and my teenaged friend group are bored. We're not cool enough to hang about in the park drinking cider. And we're not nerdy enough to play D&D. We don't have enough money to go to the cinema. What we do have is a Blockbuster card and, between […]

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Searching online for books in local libraries


List of items matching the search "Song of Achilles" - includes two versions of the book, an audio book, and other work by the author.

This is a mixture of lament and how-to guide. Suppose you've reviewed lots of books. It's pretty easy to generate a link to let people buy the book at Amazon or any other online store. But how do you link to a user's local library? You can't. There is no "search every library in the […]

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#libcampldn Library Camp London - Audio Recordings & Writeup


I haven't been to an unconference in ages - so it was nice to get back into the swing of things with LibraryCamp. It was a delight to spend time with a collection of committed professionals doing amazing things with books. As requested, I recorded all the sessions I could. Here are my notes, and […]

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